Saer, Juan José

(1937– )

   Argentine narrator, journalist, scriptwriter, literary critic, and professor of film and Latin American literature. Born in the small town of Serondino, into a working-class family of Syrian immigrants from Damascus. His family moved to Santa Fé, in the littoral of the Paraná River, when Saer was 11. Some of his poems were published in a local newspaper, where he began working as a journalist at age 19. In 1960 he published his first collection of short stories and soon began teaching courses in film and literary criticism at the Instituto de Cinematografía of the Universidad Nacional del Litoral at Santa Fé. In 1968 Saer was awarded a fellowship by the French government to study film. He settled in Paris, where he has lived ever since. He has made annual visits to his native Argentina except during the period of the military regime. He received the Premio Nadal, awarded by Editorial Nadal in Spain, for his novel La ocasión (1968, translated as The Event in 1995) and the Prix de Nantes for El entenado (1983), judged the best novel in French translation in 1988. He is a professor of Latin American literature at the University of Rennes in France. In 1993 he was a teaching fellow at Princeton University. He is a frequent lecturer on literary topics in the United States and Argentina.

   Saer is the author of several novels and volumes of short stories centered on the fictional town of Colastine and peopled by a cast of regular characters. He is also the author of several works of literary criticism that examine the literary tradition of the Southern Cone. Saer’s works associated with the period of the “dirty war” are Nadie nada nunca (1980, translated as Nobody Nothing Never in 1993) and Glosa (1986). Nadie nada nunca is a haunting story that portrays a string of several killings and mutilations of horses—a crime, unexplained and never solved, that mimics the climate of fear during the political repression. Glosa presents two conflicting choices—suicide or exile—as the only options open to two young friends in the Argentina of 1978.

   His narrative, described by a critic as “rooted . . . in a nonmagical brand of realism almost Balzacian in scope,” has also dealt with the power of memory and remembering. In an interview published in English in 1999, Saer is quoted as saying, “There can be no doubt that when we forget, it is not so much a memory we lose as our desire to remember it.”